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TIDES OF WAR 1ST EDITION PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Steven Pressfield | 9780553381399 | | | | | Tides of War 1st edition PDF Book The book also showed how fickle the fortunes of public opinion can be. Mar 19, Lizzi rated it liked it. Too, neither protagonist commands the readers empathy past the midpoint of the novel. In other words, a paradox. Well worth reading. Add to Cart. Two stars. I learned something more of the Peloponnesian War, which I studied long ago in school and only remembered vaguely. Looking for More Great Reads? Publishers Weekly. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Grandson asks who he thinks is his 'most unforgettable character'. Lists with This Book. Polemides brother, Lion is presented as a man of great integrity. Highly recommended for all who like ancient world military fiction! Harry's rather free-and-easy life wasn't characteristic of the period, which will get up the nose of some readers; I felt it was adequately explained by the wartime freeing of social strictures, as well as Harry's entree into the Ton under the aegis of the Duchess of Wellington. Historian and novelist Stella Tillyard hangs a complex and busy plot off these two characters' relationships. The author Steven Pressfield has also been on my radar for a while too so a perfect combo? Had The Tides of War been their stories, it might well have been more interesting. The tone is frequently operatic however and indeed overall the book would play out well with a Wagnerian soundtrack and a libretto focusing on hubris and the fall of man. There's no one lovable hero, and there are many, many villains. Quotes from Tides of War. The Glass Palace. E-mails come in by hundreds. Quite an acheivement, I thought, considering it's a pretty hefty tome. A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory. Obviously, this book is of less interest to those who feel their fiction must be character-driven. As a result, we care about and think about none of the characters, and none of them stand out to provide a much-needed focal point and backbone to the story. The storylines often don't intersect that much, there isn't much time to develop them, and in some cases I simply don't see the point. Absolutely the best fiction based on the Peloponnesian War BC. Let's start with the things that are not so good: The main character Polemides is an utterly stereotypical tough-soldier-dude as they litter Bernard Cornwell's books and those of his epigones. What is good besides the battles: The drama of the Sicilian expedition because it is great in Thucydides , and the speeches and political assembly scenes because they are ripped from Thucydides, and, I think, Plutarch. Works by Steven Pressfield. From the author of Dog Tags! However, it was the character of Alcibiades who loomed most large over the narrative, just as he had the greatest impact on the Peloponnesian War. It's incredible amount of detail does not explain itself. I actually didn't feel like I was in Ancient Greece nor did i have any information about the war or its people of the time, no characterisation of the main players, an endless list of names with no faces Tides of War 1st edition Writer The soldier calls it an 'alcibiadic'. Throughout the story we are given a narrative that the democracy of Athens is only good at tearing down its heroes and putting them to death which is a pretty reductive look at Athenian government. Rather than being about Harriet and James as a couple, which they never get to be again, the book is about James and the other men who went to war with him, and Harry and the other women who were left behind. The story is about the deprivations and depredations of the war and the men in it, and about the strength of the women who, because their men are missing, are almost widows before their time, and must take care of things that most married women of the time would never have to consider. Nov 17, Richard Derus rated it liked it. Follow the River. Newspapers have cut back drastically. Like run on sentences? And she's right. It's also a great big sloppy train wreck of a book! A new Tillyard?? The story is told through three narrators; a man interviewing his grandfather Jason who in turn was a lawyer who many years earlier represented Polymides who was a close confidant of Alcibiades. And at first, I thought I'd made a big mistake - it was a very slow start, with cumbersome language, difficult names of both people an Bought this at a library cast-off yard sale, thinking it would fit into my genre of historical fiction which I can both enjoy and learn something from - however unlike most of that type of novel I've read, I knew almost nothing about the subject the Peloponnesian Wars , having only covered it briefly in high-school history as another example of Sparta vs. Hard to believe that this excellent novel is set in the same time period as Jane Austen's social comedies. What I failed to realize when I signed up to read this book is that there are so many characters, a list is provided in the back. He played a major role in the second half of that conflict as a strategic advisor, military commander, and politician I can honestly say that I gave the book a fair chance but I'm not likely to finish it, so there it is: a DNF. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. A prodigal follower of Socrates, he embodied both the best and the worst of the Golden Age of Greece. It is a similar literary device to Gates of fire, converting the story to a retelling from a "middle man" - not to significant or brave, not too skilled at arms, not too heroic. The historical details are excellent and very well written but to my mind there were just too many of them and they tended to drown out the human element. Apr 06, Bettie rated it it was ok Shelves: fraudio , historical-fiction , plague-disease , war , abandoned , spring , greece , ancient-history , published This isn't interesting. Their actions lead to concluding this is a modern feminist book in disguise as an historical novel. Instead the book skips about between Europe and England and follows several characters meaning nothing is covered in depth. Each cheats. Refresh and try again. This book has some grit to it. But I suspect that it is the latter and that we as a human race have not advanced as far as we think. Who was Alcibiades? It also provides a good context which help us understand why Athenians both hated and loved Alcibiades. And he never seems to age. James McBride. I bailed somewhere in part 2. A main character, Dr. Escaping to Sparta, he proved intrumental in guiding its legendary army from one military triumph to the next. The war lasted years. Add to Wishlist. And in an indicator of the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction, the drama associated with Alcibiades' hubris, his alteringg allegiances, and the responses of the people drawn to his charismatic leadership is almost unbelieveable. Tides of War 1st edition Reviews He played a major role in the second half of that conflict as a strategic advisor, military commander, and politician Kids' Club Eligible. So what the book did for me was to put both Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades on my re-read list. Where I think the book is successful is in showing the effects of war on the participants and those left to wait for them so that many, although not physically harmed, are unable to recover emotionally and their relationships are also damaged, sometimes fatally. The novel alternates between the trials and tribulations of the British soldiers in Spain and the women left behind in London, trying to get on with their lives while all the Tides of War is a historical novel, set in London and Spain during the Napoleonic wars. James' relationship with Camille Florens, the aforementioned seductive Spanish spy don't be drawn in, she appears for perhaps all of a page or two, collectively was, though brief, the only relationship that I halfway found realistic. Lists with This Book. Also, there are some technical problems: there's a lot of "head-hopping," where the point-of-view shifts from one character to another without any page breaks to tip the reader off, and unattributed dialogue, necessitating re-reading to figure out who said what. In some cases, revealing the horrors he put his fellow Athenians through. There were too many plot elements for me to place any significance on any particular event, and also, I did not feel that I learned anything about the Peninsular War or history in general from this book. I believe that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration, whom we call artists. Apparently not the author and certainly not me. Audiobook Download. Like run on sentences? Polemides, erstwhile captain of marin The story is framed by Grandfather Jason's narration. Ultimately, Frederick loses his company to corporate manipulators. The assassin was Polemides, a friend I listen to this via the Audible platform.